by Joan Opyr
“It looks suspiciously like Shirley Temple.”
“It has one eye that doesn’t quite work. It looks suspiciously like me.”
Abby negotiated a path through my grandmother’s stacks of Life magazine to examine a framed poem. “Hey, what’s this? For Poppy on her Graduation, May 23, 1984. By Myrtle Abernathy Bartholomew.”
“Oh, for God’s sake, please don’t read that.”
“When Poppy was born, she was little and sweet, from the top of her head, to her tiny pink feet.”
“Okay, please don’t read it aloud.”
“She soon grew tall, and strong and fair, with Polish cheekbones, and short brown hair.” She paused to consider my cheekbones. “So far, so good. I suppose those are Polish cheekbones, anyway. She looked like a countess, from old Warsaw, with a brave Roman nose, and eyebrows like the Shah. Eyebrows like the Shah?”
“In some universe, Shah rhymes with Warsaw. You have to admit, my eyebrows are rather Shah-esque.” I waggled them at her for emphasis.
“More Groucho than Shah. Why is your nose brave?”
“I’m not afraid to stick it into other people’s business.”
“Ain’t that the truth. She’s graduating today, and we feel so proud, we’re telling the world, we’re shouting out loud!”
“Oh, the shame.”
“Oh, my ass. I think it’s nice. Your grandma was proud of you. She wrote you a poem. So it’s not your damn Shakespeare, so what? Your family loves you. You have no business complaining.”
“No,” I agreed. “And yes, they do. However, as long as you’re passing out pearls of wisdom, here’s one for your treasure trove. Edna loves you, too.”
“Right.”
“I have proof. Remember when we needed jobs the summer after graduation?”
“Yeah?”
“Edna got us jobs—you and me both. She didn’t have to help me. She didn’t want to help me. She did it because you asked her.”
Abby sat down on the bed and looked under Shirley Temple’s skirt. “No underwear,” she said. “Perhaps she should change her name to Dolores.”
“Perhaps you should stop violating the Littlest Rebel.”
I took the doll from her and put it back on the dresser. Across the hall, the bathroom door opened. My mother stood there, holding a curling iron.
“I’m sorry,” she said. “I told her at six o’clock to start getting ready, but you know how she is. She stayed in the tub for so long, she nearly melted.”
“It’s all right,” I said. I glanced at my watch. “The Kanki is open for another couple of hours. If we don’t make it, we can always go to the Waffle House. They’re open all night.”
“Yuck.” My mother addressed Abby. “She was always a smart ass, you know. Even as a small child.”
“I can believe it,” Abby replied.
“You have the patience of a saint.” She closed the bathroom door. I could hear Nana pottering around in the living room. I couldn’t tell what she was doing. From the sound of it, she was kicking over the stack of books that still propped up the dining room table.
I picked up a Life magazine and sat next to Abby on the bed. “Can I offer you some reading material? This is all about Jackie Kennedy.”
“Oh, thank you,” she replied. Her stomach growled. “Mind if I just eat this?”
“I warned you.”
“I know.”
“You are a saint.”
“Oh no, I’m not. No one’s ever written a poem about my nose.”
Return of the Jedi was both better and worse than I’d hoped. Better because the special effects were amazing, worse because I was too old for ewoks. Abby and I agreed that whoever had come up with them needed to be strangled.
We sat in the back of the theater, behind the rest of our friends, sharing a giant tub of buttered popcorn and a Pepsi. In front of us, Kim sat huddled up next to John Wilder. Joe and Nick sat on either side of them, and Alan sat next to Nick, casting the occasional baleful look in Kim’s direction. Dave and his brother sat down on the front row. They said they were experimenting to see which seats were the best for viewing the forest chase scene. They’d all seen the movie twice before, once on opening night, and then again on the Sunday after we came back from the beach. Two weeks had gone by since then, and this was the first day that Abby had managed to coax me into leaving my house.
Hunter hadn’t yet been by to pick up the rest of his things. He and Jean had taken up residence in a trailer in the Stonybrook trailer park. My mother and Nana had driven by late one night to look at it. The lights were on and his van was parked out front, but they didn’t see anyone, and they certainly didn’t stop.
“It’s a nice park,” my mother said. “Lots of trees and landscaping. It’s better than he deserves.”
“Did you want him to live in a hovel?”
“Yes,” she said. “That’s where he belongs, he and that idiot blonde parakeet.”
When the credits rolled on Return of the Jedi, Abby asked me if I’d found a job for the summer yet. “Are you picking tobacco for that third cousin of yours again?”
“First cousin once removed, and the answer is no. I haven’t done that since I was fourteen, and I only did it for a week then. It was hot and it was gross.”
“Uh-uh,” she said. “Like working at the flea market is better. Why don’t you come with me and put in an application at the DMV? Mama says they’re hiring temps for the summer. The pay’s okay, and it’s nice and air-conditioned.”
“What would I do?”
“You’d do whatever. Filing, typing, opening boxes of license plates.”
“I wouldn’t be making the license plates?”
“Prisoners make the license plates, so unless you’re incarcerated, no.”
The credits ended and the lights went on. Joe Chang turned around in his seat and gave us the thumbs down. “Sappy ending. Gag me.”
“‘Your father was dead, in a manner of speaking,’” Nick said, his impersonation of Alec Guinness somewhat marred by his Polish accent. “Crappy. Totally unbelievable.”
“I liked it,” Kim said. “I thought it was sweet.”
John nodded in agreement, smiling stupidly at her.
Abby and I laughed. Alan gazed at them mournfully.
“If you think it’s stupid,” I asked Nick and Joe, “then why have you seen it three times?”
“Cool special effects,” Joe said.
“Really cool,” Nick agreed.
Before we went to the personnel office at the Division of Motor Vehicles, we stopped by the file room where Abby’s mother worked. We found her sitting in the ninth row of a room full of cabinets. Edna sat in what looked like an old elementary school desk. It was a small chair with a flat top attached to it. She had a long file drawer filled with index cards in front of her and rubber finger cots on the thumb and index finger of her right hand. She looked up without smiling.
“Hi, Mama,” Abby said. “We’re here to apply for temp jobs.”
“We?”
“Poppy gave me a ride. She needs a summer job, too.”
“I don’t know how many they’re hiring.”
“Could you show us where we need to go?”
Edna extracted herself from the small chair. She was an attractive woman, not especially tall, but muscular and well built, like Abby.
“Let me tell the boss lady where I’m going,” she said. “I’ll be right back.”
She entered an office a few rows away. There was a hushed conversation and someone said, “Sure. You can use your break time.” When she came back, she plucked the rubber finger cots off and laid them next to the file drawer.
Abby and her mother walked side by side down the hall with me bringing up the rear. The less attention I drew to myself, the better. Edna was a broad-shouldered woman, and her hair was short and no nonsense. I knew that she was younger than my own mother by several years. She’d had Abby when she was eighteen, which made her thirty-five or thirty-six.
Other than that, I knew very little about her, except that she didn’t like white people, particularly me. She and Abby fought constantly, though it was clear that Abby loved her mother, or at least felt a strong sense of obligation to her.
“My mother works hard,” she said. “She never buys herself anything.”
“Don’t you wish she would?”
“All the time.”
In the personnel office, Edna spoke to a gray-haired woman in gold-rimmed glasses who, according to her nameplate, was Marcella Rockway.
“This is my daughter that I told you about, Abia.”
Marcella nodded. “And you’re looking for summer work? Can you type?”
“Yes, ma’am,” Abby said. “My friend is looking, too.” She turned around and dragged me forward. “She took typing last fall. She can do sixty words a minute.”
Edna gave me a brief, curdled look. Then she mastered her features and smiled at Marcella. “Her name is Frances Koslowski.”
“But everyone calls me Poppy,” I said.
Marcella gave me an imperious nod. “Is that right? And can you type sixty words a minute?”
“I can. So can Abby. She’s more accurate than I am, though.”
“You’re not . . .” she paused. “Can you see out of that eye?”
I nodded. Abby bristled, and I saw Edna put a hand on her arm.
“You’ll need to fill out these applications,” Marcella said. “You can sit over there and fill them out now, if you like.”
Abby and I took the applications and sat down on a short vinyl sofa.
“I’ve got to get back to the file room,” Edna said. “Will you be home for dinner tonight?”
“Yeah,” Abby said. “I’ll cook, if you like.”
“Sounds good.” She turned to walk out the door, and then she stopped and looked back over her shoulder. “Goodbye, Poppy. Thanks for giving Abby a ride down here today. I know she appreciates it.”
Abby and I looked at one another and, without saying a word, began filling out our applications. Abby listed our high school typing teacher, our principal, and her old shift manager at McDonald’s as her references. I listed the typing teacher, Cookie Turnipseed, and Edna Johnson. We both got jobs.
Chapter Twenty-Six
After years of steadfastly refusing to try anything more exotic than Chinese almond chicken, my grandmother had, at the age of seventy-five, discovered the Kanki Japanese Steak House when a Sunday school friend insisted on taking her there for her birthday. There were no tables at the Kanki. Instead, there were chef stations where you sat at a wooden counter, in the middle of which was a stainless steel griddle. A waitress took your order, and, a few minutes later, the chef for your station came out, wheeling a cart filled with kitchen tools. The thrill of the Kanki was watching the chef—usually a man and always Japanese or Japanese-American—prepare your food. Rapid slicing, knife flipping, and intricate juggling of the salt and pepper shakers were all standard features in the chef’s floorshow.
I liked the Kanki, though I felt rather ashamed by that. It was hopelessly corny, not truly Japanese cuisine, and yet the chef’s knife work was always amazing. Every chef in the place, from the most senior to the ones who were clearly still in training, could clean and butterfly a shrimp in a second, all the while keeping up a steady banter with the customers. Many of them spoke English as a second language. I tried to imagine myself cracking jokes in Japanese while tossing sharp knives into the air.
Nana loved it. She laughed when our chef, whose English seemed limited to the names of ingredients, took a squirt bottle full of oil and made a smiley face on the hot griddle. She laughed even more when he took the spatula and smeared the eyes to make them slanted.
“My God,” I whispered to Abby. “It’s worse than a minstrel show.”
“Enjoy your white privilege,” she whispered back. “I think this one’s going to have to stick to the visual jokes.”
He tossed off four quick shrimp appetizers and flipped them onto our plates.
My mother, who was sitting to Abby’s right, leaned over and said, “Forget what I told you about playing with your food. These shrimp are delicious, aren’t they? I especially like this ginger sauce.”
“What’s that?” Nana asked from my left. “I can’t hear a thing way down here.”
“Why didn’t you sit next to Mama?”
“Because you got in the middle,” she said. “Did you think I was going to bite your friend?”
Before I could answer, the chef interrupted us.
“Steak?” he asked. “How done?”
Nana and my mother wanted well done. The chef, who had just made a tower out of rings of raw onion, poured a jigger of alcohol into the small hole at the top and set it alight. He offered to cook their steaks on top of this volcano. Abby and I requested rare. He offered us each a slab of raw meat.
“Will the fun never end?” I muttered.
“Relax,” Abby said. “There’s nothing wrong with being silly every now and again. So it’s not Shakespeare. So what? Try to enjoy it anyway.”
“You’re really on poor old William’s case these days, aren’t you? I’m sure I could enjoy this if I had a drink. Or two.”
“What’s that?” Nana asked.
“You need to get the doctor to clean your ears out,” my mother observed loudly. “Quit poking in them with a Q-Tip and jamming all the wax down inside.” To me she added, “I’d tell you to order yourself a glass of wine, but your grandmother would have a fit. She thinks sniffing the cork will make you an alcoholic.”
“You think that, too.”
“I do not.”
“You don’t drink.”
“I’ve never wanted to. That doesn’t mean I think you’re an alcoholic. I’ve got a little more perspective than some people.”
“Thanks. I didn’t realize the topic had come up.”
She speared a piece of zucchini on the end of her fork. “You know how Nana is. She was bound to say something when you came over from Susan’s the other night and said you didn’t want to drive back to the hotel.”
“Oh, yeah? What?”
“She said she bet it wasn’t a case of ‘didn’t want to.’ More like ‘couldn’t.’”
I looked at Nana. She was on her fifth container of ginger sauce. From the moment the appetizers had dropped onto her plate, she’d been using up sauce faster than the chef could refill it. She poured at least two onto her fried rice.
“I’m not an alcoholic.”
“That’s what your grandfather always said,” she replied.
“I’m not a cannibal, either. That’s what Jeffrey Dahmer always said.”
I felt Abby squeeze my leg. “You’re not an alcoholic,” she breathed into my ear. “Remember what I said about trying to have fun?”
“Okay,” I said. “Let’s go all out.”
I asked the chef for a martini and a pair of chopsticks. He gazed at me for a moment, puzzled. With my left-hand, I shook a pretend drink; with my right, I made a pinching motion with my thumb and forefingers. He handed me the chopsticks and signaled to the waitress.
“A dirty martini,” I said. “Three olives, please.”
After I’d dropped the fourth piece of steak onto the front of my shirt, I began to regret my joie de vivre.
“She was always like that,” Nana told Abby. “Contrary as the day is long, and couldn’t go five minutes without dropping this or spilling that. When she was a little tiny thing, just learning to walk, I had to follow her all over the house with a broom in one hand and a mop in the other.”
“It’s true,” my mother agreed. “While I was cleaning up the powder she’d spilled in the bathroom, she’d be off in the kitchen, playing in the flour bin. I couldn’t keep up with her. None of us could.”
“Pure wild,” Nana said. “It was because she spent too much time in the playpen. That makes them wild, you know. Caging them in like that.”
“Nonsense,” said my mother. “If it weren�
�t for the playpen, we’d never have had a moment’s peace. She’d have gotten into the knives or drunk bleach or who knows what all.”
“Hello,” I said. “I’m sitting right here.”
Abby laughed. “I was a very calm child, or so I’m told. No colic. Slept through the night as soon as I came home from the hospital.”
“Wasn’t your mother lucky!” Nana exclaimed. “I don’t believe we got a wink of sleep until Poppy was two years old. We used to put her in the back of the car and drive all over Raleigh, trying to get her to fall asleep.”
My mother picked up the narrative. “And about half the time, she’d wake up just as soon as we pulled into the driveway. Then we’d have to start all over again.”
“Do you want to hear more?” I asked Abby. “Or would you like to eat your dinner?”
“I can eat and listen.”
“Thanks. You’re no help at all.”
Nana poked at my steak with her fork. “I don’t know how in the world you can eat that so bloody. It would make me pure sick.”
“Well, I don’t know how you can eat a steak cooked to the consistency of shoe leather. No wonder you have dentures. You wore out your real teeth.”
“Sass-box. Goodness—that blood has run all into your fried rice.”
“Don’t look if it bothers you. You eat your dinner and I’ll eat mine. We have different tastes.”
“Hmmph.” She gave my plate a disgusted look and went back to sawing her own steak. “What do you suppose is happening at the hospital?”
“Nothing, I hope,” my mother replied.
“I don’t know. The doctor said it could be any time now. He sure looked awful when we went to see him this afternoon. Did you go by, Poppy? Didn’t he look awful?”
“He looked like he was dying.”
“It’s a terrible shame, but I warned him. I always said he’d wind up either dead or crazy.”
“We all wind up dead,” I pointed out. “That’s not really an either /or. The only variable part is the crazy.”
“Poppy’s grandfather drank himself into Dorothea Dix Hospital,” Nana explained to Abby. “He had to be committed.”
“The washing machine was talking to him,” my mother said. “He blew a hole in it with a shotgun. Neighbors called the police.”